Dreamsongs

It doesn't happen every day, but every so often, perhaps once a year, you run into (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) someone who seems like an open book to you. You know their thoughts and feelings like you know your own, you know the meaning of a chuckle, a wink, a line in the e-mail or a story he wrote.

Well, by a story he wrote, I mean GRRM. Big old uncle GRRM has gotten very good at hiding his feelings when he started writing his A Song of Ice and Fire series, but his short stories expose him like Roose Bolton flays an enemy.

I'm reading Dreamsongs, a comprehensive, 2-volume collection of his short stories, including a lot of early ones. His science fiction stories are actually somewhat anti-science, oddly enough, and are more about channeling his romantic disappointments and mythical meditations.

It is damned eerie for me to realize that, although I cannot judge the artistic merits of these stories, I know EXACTLY what he is trying to say in these stories. He is not as precocious a writer as Ray Bradbury, who can make me sob hysterically in a few strokes. With GRRM, however, I feel like I am in his head and heart and I can follow the traces of his thoughts like my own. That is scary! (in a good way.)